The Making of Christmas Cards 2014

Plenty of people have sent me e-mails letting me know that they received their copy of my Christmas card so I guess I can sure it with the rest of the world now!

Two years worth of experience have taught me to start earlier each year so it was a bit hard to come up with something Christmas-y when I had only just caught the Halloween bug. So sadly I wasn't able to continue my unintended them from previous years of a seasonal messenger coming to your home, be it by angels or an animal.

Instead I opted for a self portrait, to make it more personal.

This Christmas, surround yourself with colorful characters!

My original plan involved a picture of myself at my desk interacting with a variety of fantasy characters. It was fun to construct this set up, but it ended up being too ambitious to be fully completed in just a month.

Its an idea I'd seen in other places and wanted to give my own take on it as a way of showing people the more fantastical elements that I like to draw.

Ed Catmull, John Lasseter and friends

Walt Kelly

Jack Kirby

To try and give it a fun twist, I added the finished card at my desk to create this weird recursion illusion. Yet another case of time limitations and necessity being the mother of invention!

Now I want to hear from you! What do you think of this year's Christmas card and how do you think I can improve for next year?

Merry Christmas!

The Making of "Party of Two"

This was actually an idea I'd started drawing around this time last year. This was about as far as I got. 

Wanting to see it through to the end, I started over by drawing about thirty different variations of the scene. I was also influenced by my then recent hobby of collecting movie stills for my inspiration files to go for a horizontal composition instead of vertical. 

Since I was trying resume my weekly postings to let people know that I was still alive and was in need of material to post I quickly threw some color onto these rough ideas. The response was both unexpected and overwhelmingly positive, so I decided that this is what I would be doing next. 

From there, I had my nose to the grindstone:

So, what have I learned?

Plotting out the composition by drawing over thirty different thumbnails really helped pull this project together, in retrospect, I wonder why I didn't hold to that pattern. Once I had figured out which sketch was going to form the basis for the final I think I was a bit quick to scan it in, blow it up and start working on the final. 

Drawing some slightly bigger scale versions after deciding on might have helped work out a number of the lighting and background details that I was struggling to develop towards the end. 

See the finished product and the story behind it here.